Missa Papae Marcelli

G P da Palestrina 1525?-1594

Tuesday 27 November 2001, 8pm

with plainsong propers and sacred motets by Palestrina and Orlando di Lasso 1532-1594

Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina was Rome's greatest polyphonist at a time when the Italian polyphonists dominated the choral landscape of Europe. His remarkable mass setting Missa Papae Marcelli is named for Pope Marcellus, who held the Papacy for only three weeks in the mid 1550s; Marcellus was outspoken in his distate for overly embellished polyphony and its detraction from the importance of the spoken liturgy and the delivery of sacred texts. While not Palestrina's shortest mass, Missa Papae Marcelli is far from his longest and it is also quite direct in its delivery of the texts of the Ordinary. The work combines compositional ingenuity, polyphonic mastery and sheer spiritual joy in a fashion that Palestrina seldom duplicated in his later compositions.

This performance of Missa Papae Marcelli marks the 15th anniversary of The Tudor Consort and harkens back to the group's beginnings in 1986 (one of the Consort's earliest performances was Missa Papae Marcelli) through a refocusing on the fundamentals which have made the name of The Tudor Consort synonymous with excellence in early choral music in New Zealand: artistic excellence, superb choral balance and blend, and historical accuracy through liturgical reconstruction.